It turns out Gene Morphis, the CFO of Francesca‘s who was terminated for cause Monday, wasn’t simply overly active on his social media accounts. His tweets were moving the stock price, reports CIO Journal (with a major assist from sister publication CFO Journal) — a no-no irrespective of social media mores.

It took management a while to realize what was happening, but “this might have been caught earlier,” Hogan Lovells attorney Dori Hanswirth said. Hanswirth says companies can help avoid this type of situation by asking senior executives and others with access to sensitive information to provide their social networking handles.

There’s more news about social media stumbles below.

Avnet cuts IT spending to offset uncertainty in euro zone. “We don’t play for the short term, we play for the long term,” Avnet CIO Steve Phillips tells CIO Journal. The Phoenix-based multinational electronics distributor generates 30% of sales from Europe, so it’s continuing to invest in supply chain and logistics software, but is delaying new hires and cutting power consumption in its data centers by virtualizing servers.

J.C. Penney tripped up by plethora of apps. “Customization is not your friend,” Mike Kramer, chief operating officer of the broad line retailer told analysts during an earnings call Tuesday. JCP reported a 20% drop in sales and suspended its dividend, missing analysts’ expectations, and Kramer explained the company was hindered operationally because it has to manage almost 500 software applications, the vast majority of which have been customized. “Ninety percent of my IT spend is on maintenance fees and only ten percent goes to strategic initiatives,” he said.

Big Data threatens to upend the $9 billion music publishing industry. The Byzantine manner by which music copyright royalties are calculated “has been done much the same way for the last 75 to 100 years, and it is riddled with inaccuracies,” according to Scott Schreer, a successful jingle writer who co-founded Tunesat so he could determine what he’s really owed. Tunesat has now recorded and stored 14 million pieces of music played on television and radio stations around the world, and helps subscribers calculate their royalties — potentially cutting performing rights organizations such as ASCAP and BMI out of a $9 billion global market, reports CIO Journal’s Steve Rosenbush.

Apple will continue to dominate tablet sales in 2012. Tablet sales are echoing the “wild exuberance” of the cellphone industry in its early years, market watcher IHS iSuppli said in a report issued Tuesday. The analysts predict unit growth will soar 85% to 126 million in 2012 and 63% to 205 million in 2013. Apple’s iPad is expected to dominate sales, capturing 61% of 2012 market share. But IHS iSuppli predicts that things could get more interesting for the industry (and CIOs) in late 2012 with the launch of a new generation of tablets that use the forthcoming Windows 8 operating system from Microsoft, CIO Journal reports.

CIO Journal goes to the MIT CIO Symposium. The symposium takes place next Tuesday, and I’ll be moderating a panel on the “dual mandates” faced by CIOs — keeping costs low while supporting innovation. I’ll be joined by Frank Modruson, Christian Anschuetz, Bill Krivoshik, and Steven John — CIOs, respectively of Accenture, Underwriters Laboratories, Time Warner, and Workday — as well as Tom Sanzone, SVP of technology at Booz Allen Hamilton, as we work our way through that paradox. If you’re attending, please shoot me a note — I’m arriving Monday afternoon, and I’d be happy to buy a round of drinks.

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is alive. Contrary to a tweet from a Twitter account claiming to belong to Italian author Umberto Eco, Nobel-prize winning author Marquez is not dead, but merely the latest victim of a Twitter death-rumor mill, reports the Guardian’s Alison Flood. An Italian schoolteacher, linked to other death rumors, may be responsible for the fake Eco account. “Social media is the most unverifiable information source in the world but the news media believes it because of its need for speed,” the Italian prankster told the Guardian in March.

Uh-oh Facebook, Part I. General Motors announced that it’s pulling back from advertising on Facebook after finding that paid ads have had little impact on car purchases. The announcement, coming days before Facebook’s IPO, could spell bad news if other major advertisers follow suit, report the Journal’s Sharon Terlep, Suzanne Vranica and Shayndi Raice. The pullback comes as more advertisers start to question the social network’s effectiveness. ”Companies in industries from consumer electronics to financial services tell us they’re no longer sure Facebook is the best place to dedicate their social marketing budget—a shocking fact given the site’s dominance among users,” Forrester analyst Nate Elliott tells the Journal. GM Spends $40 million on its Facebook presence, with $10 million paid to Facebook for advertising.

Uh-oh Facebook, Part 2…. Half of Americans think Facebook is a passing fad according to a joint poll by the Associated Press and CNBC. Among those polled who used Facebook, three out of five expressed little or no faith that the social network will protect their private information. And over half of users said they never click on Facebook ads–the company’s main hope for revenue.

Facebook strikes another mobile deal. Facebook has scooped up the staff of mobile photo-sharing service Lightbox. The deal is not an acquisition, and Facebook won’t acquire the company data, but the hiring of Lightbox’s seven staffers underscores the importance the company is placing on mobile efforts just days before its IPO, reports AllThingsD’s Mike Isaac. Facebook acquired mobile discovery startup Glancee last week and the company is still working through its $1billion April offer to mobile photo-sharing company Instagram.

They’re livin’ it up at the Hotel California. The new Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park is like Disneyland for the geeky, fresh-out-of- college set, complete with a cultural center–The Hacker Square–bespoke dining rooms, noshing corners, comfy couches, ironic artwork and… mini bars? The WSJ has a slideshow.

Did Facebook read CIO Journal’s story on the stunning lack of women in IT?We’d like to think so. Bloomberg’s Carol Jymowitz and Douglas MacMillan report that Facebook hopes to include at least one woman in its bid to add directors to the board. Among the candidates: former eBay president Lorrie Marie Norrinton and Allianz Global Investors Capital’s Marna Whittington. Currently Facebook’s board remains all male.

And then there’s Google+. A new study appearing on Fast Company finds low levels of engagement on the public portion of Google’s social network with about 30% of users who make a public post never making a second one. The findings dovetail with what the Journal’s Amir Efrati wrote back in February about Google+ being a “virtual ghost town.”

IBM helps oil companies manage gusher of data. IBM thinks it can make geologists and engineers more effective at mining the fast-growing wealth of data on everything from oil reservoirs to refineries to help them find, extract and process oil. The computer services company has spent the past three years building a team of 5,000 consultants, scattered around major oil basins world-wide, to help companies tackle the data explosion, reports Reuters.

Nvidia aims to lift graphics into the cloud. Nvidia is trying to move gaming and other high-performance computing chores from personal computers and gaming consoles to the web. The effort—announced with support from some prominent hardware and software makers—was a surprise addition to new information Nvidia disclosed about Kepler, the code name for its next generation of graphical processors, at an Nvidia technical conference in San Jose, Calif. It builds on a concept called virtualization, a technology that allows many software applications to share processor chips, report the Journal’s Don Clark and Ian Sherr.

ESPN in talks with Apple for expanded TV access. Walt Disney’s ESPN sports network is talking with Apple about giving subscribers online access to programming through the computer maker’s Apple TV device, according to two executives, Bloomberg reports.

Amazon goes on hiring spree. Amazon.com has set a torrid hiring pace in recent months, accelerating a rate of employee acquisitions that was already well ahead of most large corporations, reports the WSJ‘s John Letzing. The sharp influx could leave the Internet retail giant well positioned for future opportunities—or possibly overextended, analysts say.

T-Mobile cuts jobs. T-Mobile confirmed that it will cut 900 jobs as part of a restructuring that it said will help fund the rollout of its 4G LTE network as well as its re-branding effort, among other things. The move comes after the carrier announced 1,000 job cuts in March, reports PC Magazine’s Chloe Albanesius.

Here comes the ‘sohn (and Yahoo says, ‘It’s all right’). Former colleagues describe Yahoo’s new temporary/possibly permanentCEO Ross Levinsohn as a straight talker at ease in stressful situations—a perfect antidote for a company brought low by a decade of missteps, culminating in last week’s revelation of then-CEO Scott Thomspon’s inflated educational credentials. Levinsohn has a history with content companies, serving as president of Fox Interactive Media, as well as holding spots at HBO and CBS. “He’s known both in New York as well as in Silicon Valley,” an analyst at B. Riey & Co. tells Bloomberg’s Brian Womack. And Joseph Walker of FINS spots sunshine coming from Yahoo’s content creation departments. “He’s a bright guy, an engaging speaker and he’s from the part of the organization that journalists would like to see dominate the company,” an editorial employee says.

Hackers exploit reported Flash, Java flaws. Using two well-known security flaws in Abode Flash and Java, hackers have hit websites belonging to foreign policy and human rights groups. Both vulnerabilities have since been patched, but the hacks demonstrate how quickly hackers can react between the time a vulnerability is first publicized and the time taken for programmers to develop a patch and website owners to install the fix, reports the New York Times’ Nicole Perlroth.

Google the disintermediator targets wireless companies. Google hopes to break the influence of wireless carriers on Android mobile devices by providing multiple device makers with early access to new versions of its Android operating system. The search giant also plans to sell those devices, without a wireless contract, directly to consumers, the WSJ’s Amir Efrati reports. Previously Google had partnered with one hardware maker at a time. The new devices are expected by Thanksgiving.

The more people love mobile, the less they like Microsoft. American consumers are increasingly finding Microsoft products “cumbersome” and “difficult” according to a recent survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Index. But dissatisfaction stems less from particular products, such as Microsoft’s ill-received Windows Vista, than from the increased exposure consumers are having to mobile apps. “For 99 cents you buy an app that does some kind of very cool thing, and by comparison, traditional software looks cumbersome,” survey director David VanAmburg tells InfoWorld’s Gregg Keizer.

Mr. Peanut Butter Manifesto gets a new gig. While at AOL in 2006 Brad Garlinghouse earned Silicon Valley fame with “The Peanut Butter Manifesto,” a memo advocating that the struggling online entity needed to focus on a few key areas and not spread itself too thin—like peanut butter, get it? The Journal’s Pui-Wing Tam reports that Garlinghouse has now joined file-sharing firm YouSendIt as CEO. “I’d much rather go to a company that’s underhyped,” said Garlinghouse.

EVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW

Light at the end of the tunnel? The recovery may look shaky, but CFOs say their companies are starting to hire and they’re starting to spend. Half the financial executives in the latest CFO Quarterly Outlook Survey from FEI and Baruch College believe that the country is in the midst of a recovery and they’re not so worried about inflation or oil prices. They don’t think much of President Obama or Congress, but U.S. CFOs’ confidence in the global economy jumped more than five points and their optimism in their own companies saw a three point increase from Q4.

“U.S. CFOs remain particularly optimistic in their companies’ expectations, reflecting projections in net earnings, optimism in the U.S. economy and small dips in unemployment rate,” says John Elliott, Dean of Baruch’s Zicklin School of Business.

The most encouraging nugget is that the majority of U.S. CFOs (62%) plan to hire in the next six months. Prospects aren’t so bright in Europe, where with only a third of CFOs (35%) said they plan to add staff. But European CFOs weren’t quite so upbeat in general. The full survey is available as a PDF.

J.P. Morgan fallout: what you need to know. J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon escaped unscathed from the firm’s annual meeting – delivering some expected mea culpas and hinting at possible clawbacks, while the whole board of directors was elected with more than 86% support from shareholders. That included Ellen Futter, a member of the bank’s risk committee, the WSJ notes. “We think you are doing a fabulous job,” one shareholder told Dimon as attendees applauded. The FBI might think differently. It’s opened in inquiry into the trading losses, Reuters reports.

Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil isn’t surprised that regulators seem to have been oblivious to huge risks at a bank they were supposed to be overseeing. He says the only way to end too-big-to-fail is to break up all the big banks. “Forget the Volcker rule, which has been defanged by industry lobbying and whining. Bring back the Glass-Steagall Act … to separate commercial lending from investment banking. Then maximize transparency: The investments that banks make with federally insured deposits shouldn’t be a secret.”

China flexes its regulatory muscle. China is turning out to be the biggest hurdle in Google’s proposed Motorola deal. Regulators there have to weigh in on any acquisition if the combined company would have about $63 million in Chinese sales and $1.5 billion in global sales, Deal Professor explains. These are low thresholds and it puts China into the calculus of any deal of a significant size. “Many countries have similar antitrust review processes, but companies can just ignore those small markets in many cases. China can’t be ignored.”

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited's fourth annual Millennial Survey reveals the business activities and outcomes members of Generation Y would prioritize if they held leadership positions. In highlighting millennials' priorities, the survey results draw attention to this generation's values and the themes large enterprises should speak to if they wish to attract and retain members of this rising workforce.